If we must then abandon the hope of seeing Shakespeare in his workshop,
we may, nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text some notion of the
manner in which Shakespeare was staged in his own day, and of how he
fared at the hands of the early actors. Romeo and Juliet is an
exceptionally difficult play to act, and the difficulties seem to have
been about the same in Shakespeare's time as they are to-day. They are,
in fact, inherent in the structure of the work itself.
As artists advance in life, they develop, by growing familiar with the
conditions of their art, the power of concealing its limitations,--a
faculty in which even the greatest artists are often deficient in their
early years. There is an anecdote of Schumann which somewhat crudely
illustrates this. It is said that in one of his early symphonies he
introduced a passage leading up to a climax, at which the horns were to
take up the aria in triumph. At the rehearsal, when the moment came for
the horns to trumpet forth their message of victory, there was heard a
sort of smothered braying which made everybody laugh.
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